Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Silly Sets

I’ve never really liked item sets in these silly RPGs and their cousins, MMOs.

From Diablo to Titan Quest to Torchlight to World of Warcraft, there always seems to be a subset of items that function as a set, where equipping more than one of the set gives some sort of bonus. That’s fine design, since it gives gear a little more meaning and fun, rooted in that sweet, sweet loot pinata jackpot endorphin rush. The item sets themselves don’t bother me, actually, it’s just that actually putting together a set based on random (and usually very rare) loot drops is an exercise in futility.

Combine the leveling mechanism (gain experience points from killing stuff and quests, level up, be stronger and more specialer, ad infinitum) with the rarity of actually acquiring those set items, and the fact that you have to kill a lot of pinatas to get said gear and well… more often than not, the activity of grinding to try to acquire those set pieces makes them obsolete by the time you get all of them because you’ve leveled up a few times (or more) trying to get them.

I do call that bad design, at least if those sets are meant to ever be completed when they might be relevant to the bulk of gameplay. (And if they are not meant to be so completed, why have them at all?) Why offer the Perseus Hunter set for the dashing midlevel Hunter if they have almost no chance whatsoever of assembling the set before they start shopping for the Artemis Set? The storytelling often included in item sets is fractured beyond usability, and the function of the gear gets lost to the winds.

Yes, yes, there’s a market for gear sets for “twinks” in WoW (sometimes, anyway, and mostly just for stuff that doesn’t Bind on Pickup), and gear sets are great for role players, especially with appearance tabs (if you’re lucky enough to have them, like LOTRO). Some “endgame” gear sets are good, too, since you’re not leveling up any more, and character progression is largely based on gear. Item sets aren’t wholly useless by any means, they are just… silly.

At the level cap, you can at least “sidegrade” to gear set pieces if they wind up being better as a set than whatever other random stuff you’ve collected. That’s solid design to keep people playing when the leveling system has fallen into uselessness. Bonus points if those sets look sweet together. Guild Wars largely gets this right, since the level cap (and gear effectiveness cap!) is reached pretty easily, and at that point, chasing item sets makes more sense.

And yet, item sets simply aren’t all that special in the leveling content, since the rarity of special items for the set runs contrary to the core leveling mechanic of the game. Some players will collect the sets anyway, knowing full well that they will be largely useless once collected, but many will just use a set item for as long as it’s useful on its own, since the set bonuses are extremely unlikely to ever come into play at all. It’s just another piece of random loot at that point.

That’s just… silly.

Of course, I do think that games need a bit of silly here and there to break up all the Serious Gaming Business, but game elements that are internally conflicted like this just set off my “wait, what’s the point?” alarms. It’s that clash and tension between leveling and collecting stuff for a narrow level band that bugs me.

So… how to do it better? Would item set pieces work better if they were extremely common rather than rare and special? Maybe give a real chance for the set to be collected in time for it to be useful? Maybe shift item sets from random loot drops to purchasable items? Enhance the purchasable set with upgrades from loot drops, to catch the best of both worlds? Maybe work like the “satchel loot” from WoW’s Dungeon Finder (guaranteed high quality gear for running dungeons… not really a “set”, but definitely themed and visually unified)? As in, you’re guaranteed a set item if you do certain tasks, and set items are paced properly to be useful for when you get them and a bit beyond?

What else could we do as designers?

And yes, I know that these sets are one more layer of addiction for the completionist and collection (pack rat) mentalities of players, but since there’s never really much of a payoff (considering pacing and obsoletion of item sets once fully collected), I’d argue that it’s not a very effective layer of addiction. (Of course, maybe that’s a good thing…)

It’s just that the randomness of the loot mechanic and the rarity of item sets, layered on top of the leveling system, well… it’s silly.

What if you had the individual items of the set balanced so that they work at different levels. So first you find the sword, which is balanced to work alone for levels twenty to thirty. About level thirty, when the sword is starting to lose it’s usefulness, you find the breastplate, which is balanced to work alone for levels thirty to forty, and it gives a bonus to the sword, so that it is good until level forty. Then at level forty, you find the helmet, which could be used alone from levels forty to fifty, but it also gives a bonus to the sword and breastplate making them useful again.

So the set could stay relevant through most of the game, but if you don’t care about the set the individual items would still be useful.

In the leveling portion of a game, maybe the entire set could be granted for completing or achieving a series of tasks or quests or something. I wouldn’t want a random gear drop of the entire set, I’d want to have to do something interesting to get it, but by giving the set at once I wouldn’t level past its usefulness.

But would I take it for granted if I earned it all at once? Perhaps. I would be able to use it, and maybe after that there could be random or purchaseable items or enhancements (useful or asthetic) that I could add to the set over the period of that set’s usefulness. Not having these enhancements wouldn’t hurt gameplay, but adding little things to the set may keep it interesting.

Klep, I’ve argued for a level-less MMO before, with “progression” entirely based in gear. Naturally, the power level band would be much narrower as well. Seems to me sets might work better there.

Darius, that might work. It’s almost how the Satchel loot works, with set bonuses layered on top. There’s almost a “heirloom” flavor to it, too. So, yes, that seems like another good avenue to explore.

Gronthe, maybe to preserve the sweet, sweet random addiction, sets might be more loosely defined? As in, there might be five different helms and six different chestplates that count for the Gladiator Set, thereby expanding the chances of getting set-relevant pieces, while preserving the randomness?

Looser set definitions could work. For example, shadowcraft and wildheart could be interchangable, but druids get the druid set bonuses and rogues get the rogue set; though clearly this works better for the druids due to what the stats are. But that’s the general idea I’m shooting for.

Or certain set items could be traded in for others, so if you keep seeing the warlock drops, the priests and mages could trade those for priest and mage tier. This creates the problem of the drops being treated like set tokens which are more convenient for one class, depending on the luck.

On an unrelated note, Troll Shaman is a misleading way to name my blog in your blogroll.

What I’d like to see personally is more overall gear choices. tiers are fine and some people like collecting tiers for their looks (like me), but I’d still like to be able to assemble my own gear set (the one I actually use in raids) myself, rather than blizzard tellling me “this is your tier and it’s the best option, so don’t bother looking for anything else yourself”. there should be sidegrades just as good as tiers, so players can cut their gear out to support their playstyle. I guess that brings us to problem nr.2 though – there being no different “playstyles” really, huh….

Klep, well, I *did* consider calling it “Klepsacovic’s Repository of Cynicism and Wittery”, but that got too long, and KRoCaW didn’t look right. I went with the URL name. Maybe I’ll change it simply to “Klepsacovic”.

I like the idea of trading set pieces in for relevant stuff… but then, why bother with that if you could make loot drop like it does in DDO: it’s always class-relevant, and everyone gets *something* they can use. Of course, that’s from dungeons; open world drops may well benefit from a set piece trading house.

Syl, I’d love to see more valid playstyles as well as other progression paths that don’t involve just killing everything. There’s also plenty of room for “sidegrades”, methinketh. (And appearance tabs, but that’s another discussion.) Then again, I’ve never bought into the “your class must be identifiable for PvP” arguments…

…or win as often as we lose? wouldn’t that rather fit the definition of ‘random’ (bit like the half full, half empty thing)…
also can you actually feel ‘wins’ if there’s no losses?

brings me back to my own topic of needing hardships in the game. i don’t feel an accomplishment without challenge and the odd losses in between. so i’d actually opt for more randomness.

right now in wow, the idea of NOT having a set completed, a rep on exalted etc. is amagad-outrageous! I actually had uncompleted sets in vanilla and it didn’t kill me.
world of collector-craft…and I like to collect myself mind, but I’d still not sacrifice variety and immersion for it the way it’s been done in wotlk.

Remember that I’m talking more about leveling sets rather than sets at the endgame. The latter are easier, as set collection is mostly about time investment, and at the endgame, you’re not outleveling potential dropped set pieces. You can even go back and collect all those Defias pieces if you want, steamrolling the Deadmines with a level-capped character. If you try to collect them all when you’ve the appropriate level, you’ll likely outlevel them by the time you collect the full set, and that’s really odd design. It’s inefficient when you create a desire for something to propel play, then make that thing too easily obsoleted.

Yes, play isn’t always about the *stuff*, but sets *are* all about the collection, and leveling runs contrary to that design. It’s that internal conflict of interest that makes the game design weird.

If we won as often as we lost, that would be a 50% chance of getting what we were after. More likely the drop is a 1 in 8 chance competing with half of a 25 man raid.
You keep using words like “challenge” when talking about random. But random loot doesn’t make it any harder to kill the boss, it just means farming him more. Once the boss is dead, the challenge is over.

That’s very true. it’s not so much the randomness itself that is the challenge because you cannot control or ever win against randomness, you can only get lucky.

still, randomness forces us to play the game in different ways and adapting to that can translate into challenge. if you have to dedicate yourself to farming a random drop for potentially months with a 5man team, then killing the same bosses to get it might not be the main challenge, but finding a group every day or organizing your own group to keep signing up, certainly is. it comes down to time spent and other requirements, like organization.

so I don’t think randomness makes it harder per se, but it makes it more interesting because randomness is chaotic and asks you adapt. maybe gear drops are a bad example for this though, because here it only translates into the grind in wow. I’d like to see it applied in other ways…hmmm.

maybe it’s worth a post sometime! =D
also, my claim stands that if we don’t lose, we don’t feel great about winning – at least randomness can deliver loss, even if I don’t think in the best way.

Interesting what GW2 and ROM is doing with armor. You can take any item which graphic you like, and any item with stats you like, and combine them. So you can tailor the look you like with the stats you want (need) and play away.

I believe ROM is also doing the dye thing, where you can further customize.

Bonus points for ROM for allowing you to merge a cloth looking armor piece of gear with stats from a plate piece.

The problem here is that some designs (and designers) are absolutely terrified about the idea of players actually winning or accomplishing something. This is because the logical followup to winning something is, naturally, “Well, what next?” and usually there isn’t anything next, or you’re working on it, or it won’t be ready for 2 months, etc.

Take the drop rate of set pieces at (or close to) the endgame. Let’s say for the sake of argument it’s 5%. That’s a drop rate designed purely and exclusively not to reward the player, but to keep the player trying. It’s used as a speed bump to keep the player more or less there until the next injection of content (of course, after the injection the drop rate doesn’t change, but that’s grain from another sack).

Now take a look at the drop rate of “leveling” or “mid-game” set pieces. It will have the same rate or whereabouts, which is illogical. Nothing happens to the player at the end when he tries and tries again to beat that 5% rate. At the most, gold or reputation gains. But try after try after try while the player is leveling, well… eventually levels the player and renders acquiring the set moot.

The two rates cannot in good conscience be equal or even similar. They have to account for the estimated number of times the thing will be tried before it becomes irrelevant. The solution is to increase the rate of mid and early game set piece drops to something more in tune with the rate of player progress…

… but of course for some reason “we can’t do that” because “everyone else will get it and look the same” (as if that didn’t happen at the endgame anyway) or -insert excuse here-.

Designers are generally terrified of having players with nothing to do, and the solution we unfortunately decided early on was not to find a way to drown them with fresh content or fresh ways to reinterpret existing content, but long grinds, reputation tracks, gigantic cooldowns and microscopical drop rates.

It’s not entirely the designers’ fault. Creating content takes time and money. Gobs of it. But we have failed at finding a better way to create new content at a fast pace. We’ve been living with the grind band-aid on for years.

Syl/Klep… offtopic? Most of what I do around here is run tangents. No worries, since it makes for good discussion. 🙂

Isey, W101 does the gear splicing, too, as well as the dye, though it’s through a paint shop interface. I’ve been a fan of customizable gear like that for a while now. That would definitely let players keep the looks once they collect the set gear, even if outleveled. They might be outclassed mechanically, but splice in that Tier X set of stats and party on, hm?

Tangentially, it might be interesting to fully embrace the Heirloom mechanic and make some sets that level with the player.

Julian, I’d note that a significant part of that fear (nicely described, by the way) is rooted in the subscription model. If your revenue stream doesn’t depend on addiction or grind keeping players jacked in, you don’t have to design around that fear. Say, with the GW model, once people have paid you their money, it’s not terribly important to keep them playing. It’s true that at some level an MMO tends to thrive on a critical mass of players, so there’s *some* impetus to keep people tinkering around in the world, but it requires far less pressure and can grow organically from actually having a bunch of content that’s fun to replay rather than required to replay.

…at least, in theory. In practice, some people will still grind or go collecting to min/max the system. *shrug*

Tesh, I’m not sure I agree with pinning it on the sub model. That might have been the case, say, 10 years ago but since then we’ve had plenty of examples of different models and schemes and they all rely on making things as long as possible and being rather stingy with the rewards.

You cite GW and it’s true it doesn’t have a sub model. But then how come it is, and always has been, grind city? If you’re not grinding for cosmetic titles, you’re grinding for cosmetic drops or grinding for elite skills or grinding for alliance rep, etc.

Recently you can observe this very well in F2P titles (or No Cover Charge titles, whichever definition you prefer). There is no obligatory sub, but the grind is still put in there. Not only that, but to further illustrate the point that everyone knows about it and it’s done artificially long on purpose, the game stores sell you some shortcuts. Makes lots of sense from business point of view, but not so much from others.

So I don’t think it passes through the business model. It’s about keeping players engaged and playing which, by the way, I fully agree with. We need to do that. But grind is one of the worst ways to go about it. Grind ultimately exists because we either can’t or find it too expensive to feed games with new content in a timely manner and there has to be a way to keep players in the game. It’s a rough solution. In a way we’re brute-forcing our way into players’ interest in the game.

That’s the biggest failure of design of the last 10 years. Not that grind exists, but that we still can’t think of anything better and we can’t seem to reduce development costs.

True, perhaps the genesis of grind isn’t the sub model, but there’s certainly a nasty positive feedback loop built in.

Offline RPGs do tend to pad out playtime with plenty of grind too, so we’re also probably seeing some inheritance from that lineage. There’s this weird hardcore gamer notion out there that “more time = more fun”.

On content generation, procedural generation or player-driven generation is all that can keep ahead of players. That will require a big shift in how the games work and probably a shift away from superblingy “polished” visuals. More MineCraft, less Final Fantasy.

I think at some point in the nebulous past it was tacitly decided that longer = more fun, just as for a while we lived with the mantra that more people = more epic.

We got away from the latter one when designers got the metrics back, poured over the numbers and got an unwilling reality check and a crash course in logistics. More people didn’t mean more epic, it only bogged things down to a point that <5% of the playerbase was taking part in it.

If we could get away from that then I'm hopeful that at some point we'll also get away from relating length with fun. I agree that, generally speaking, if something is good then more of it is better, but we need to be careful on how we administer that length and what shape we're giving to it.

Myself, I'm a sucker for variety and I'd much rather engage and invest into a game if it offered me 15 or 20 short, but different things to do, than five or six exceedingly long ones, even if the rewards are better. This is not an appeal to sticking in mini-games wherever they fit. It's an appeal to variety and the kind of games I like to play.

[…] Tesh reminds me of Torchlight’s set items. I was excited the first time a purple item dropped, which might just be conditioning from MMOs that make purple the color of awesome, but upon reflection I never found much use for sets. As Tesh says, you out-level items very quickly; in Torchlight, leveling every 15-20 minutes is taking your time. […]

Doing an Angmar quest line, I started collecting pieces of various sets (bracelets of bukh something or other, necklace, etc.) and on completing the quest line, I had a full, passably decent, set that was just a little bit inferior to the proc’ed crafted gear of that level. Ditto for other Angmar quests.

What I’d like to see is a system where dungeon X drops one set (one for each class), while dungeon Y drops another set (one for each class).

Well, when I say dungeon I really mean more like a campaign setting, and where X,Y,Z are equal level peers and not a tiered arrangement.

Thus, if I prefer for some reason to beat upon the ogres of Grimm Peak then eventually I’ll have the Grimm Peak set. Don’t make me hike all the way across the world to grind some foreign dungeon for the leg piece, that makes no sense at all.

Grinding the one place for a set also makes it reasonable that the local allies (eg. the Beleagured League of Grimm Peak) also handing out pieces as your reputation there improves.

They might even offer a way of exchanging an off-class piece for a relevant piece. I wouldn’t make it a simple trade/vendor dealio though .. they might send you on some quest to fetch 10 ogre charms which get used in the transformation process.